Too many people are put off opera because they can’t accept the visual contradiction between realatively mature singers playing young and supposedly attractive lovers. I have never been to bothered by that as, for me anyway, in the hands of a great composer such as Giuseppe Verdi, if the singers have the voice and can put in a bit of acting wellie then it is mostly all there in the music but I know not everyone agrees with me.

I was thrilled though to come across the dvd over the weekend of Verdi’s Egyptian opera Aida directed by the grand old Italian opera and movie director Franco Zeffirelli using a cast of young singers (with new young voices trained for this production by that peerless Itallian stylist, the great tenor Carlo Bergonzi) in a small opera house where they didn’t need the big voices of great star singers.

Aida is often done as a spectacle opera even though there aren’t that many scenes that demand grand effects. In the end it is about a few passionate people caught in a terrible dilemma through the conflicts of love and patriotism.

In Zeffirelli’s hands, the whole thing is wonderfully convincing and for me, a Verdi lover who has never particularly taken to this opera, it was a revelation.

It was wonderful to have an Aida, the splendid Adina Aaron, who is supposed to be a beautiful young Ethiopian Princess who looks like a beautiful young Ethiopian princess. stick with this scene and you will see what I mean. You might even want to see the whole thing.

It is a good week to listen to something with an Egyptian theme – we need as many encouraging things as we can think of to associate with that troubled country. Verdi, after all was a great fighter for liberating suffering peoples.

In this scene, the Egyptian princess Amneris (the exciting young mezzo soprano Kate Aldrich) prepares for the triumphant return of the man she loves, the young leader of the Egyptian army, Radames. she suspects that he is in love with her slave girl, the captured Ethiopian princess,  Aida (Adina Aaron). She wheedles the information out of the love-sick girl by pretending to be her friend.

The young Egyptian captain, Radames, the object of both women’s love, looks like like a young Egyptian captain too. Verdi wastes little time in the opera either letting us know just what Radames feels for Aida and the young tenor Scott Piper doesn’t disappoint.

The post Zeffirelli’s Aida – not all opera singers have the wrong bodies to be young lovers. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

If you did watch the Japanese video extract above, the moving and tragic soprano aria from the last act of Verdi’s opera Don Carlos and stayed with it beyond the tape damage and weren’t put off by the Japanese subtitles, you would have heard one of the great soprano voices that Britain produced in the 20th. Century which, sadly, in my opinion at least, became painful to listen to later in her career when she took on heavier roles.

I heard Gwyneth Jones, now of course the grandly titled Dame Gwyneth Jones, in those early days at Covent Garden in the big-voiced, the so-called spinto roles, in two of Verdi’s mature operas, Il Trovatore and Don Carlos. In both productions I was taken by surprize and then blown away by the combined power and beauty of her voice. It was an early experience of the excitement that a big, well-controlled Verdi soprano voice could bring – something that has become a rarer experience recently.

The production of Don Carlos, by the late Italian film and opera director, Luchino Visconti also starred one of the undisputedly greatest singers of our age, the Bulgarian bass, Boris Christoff in the central role of King Philip II of Spain.

If I have to decide on a “favourite opera” then it might well be this and, if so, it would have been thanks to that astonishing performance of so long ago. I have finally reached it in my chronological journey through classical music where I have only been listening to music composed in my chosen year and before, so I have been looking forward to this moment, 1867, for, maybe twelve years now.

The opera, based on an epic play by the German Romantic playwright and poet, Schiller, concerns six main characters whose lives intermingle in the brutal, rigid and tragic world of Sixteenth Century Spain at the time of the Inquisition. The king, a bass role, isolated, unloved and whose total power is only limited by the ferociously blinkered and literally blind 90 year old Grand Inquisitor, another bass in this dark, brass dominated score, who is a vicious portrait of Verdi’s much-loathed Roman Catholic Church. Philip has married the Princess of France, Elizabeth, our spinto soprano, who had previously been engaged to his son, Don Carlos, a cruelly difficult role for the tenor whose is often placed awkwardly and precariously high. Elizabeth and Carlos fell in love before the change of plan and, consequently, all three lives were propelled into unhappiness and despair. There is also the beautiful but vengeful Princess Eboli who lives to curse her own beauty and who hurries the drama to its tragic and inevitable end whilst giving Verdi the opportunity to write one of the most exciting roles in the repertoire for the Italian contralto voice. His writing here foreshadows the voices he was thinking of when writing the spectacular Requiem Mass a few years later. The sixth part is for Verdi’s favourite voice, the high baritone, Rodrigo, the young passionate Romantic idealist of Schiller’s imagination who is Carlos’ friend and protector and would do anything for him, even die for him in the cause of liberty.

Verdi sneerers quote the highly romantic friendship duet between Rodrigo (Thomas Hampson) and Carlos (Roberto Alagna) as one of the examples of Verdian lack of taste when the provincial Italian town band overwhelms the great artist. If anything, I have always found the earthiness of Verdi’s inspiration all the more powerful in an operatic context. The ground moves for me every time I hear the pomp and circumstance of the passage that interrupts the duet with the arrival of the King, Carlos’ father, and Elizabeth, his love and now step-mother accompanied by Dominican friars and music that shows us how the unbalanced young man’s passion is going to be crushed under the feet of the state. The writing for the voices vividly captures their desperation.

These characters are all drawn with a depth that involves us intimately with their fate which, as can be foretold by the opera’s first chord, is going to be an unhappy one.

This is Verdi’s great Grand Opera written for the home of grand opera, the Paris Opera House in 1867 and superseding any grand opera before or after it. It was then revised a number of times, in French and Italian until no one can really tell which is the best version.

Even though the words undoubtedly fit better to the notes in French, all versions work in the right hands and with the right voices. Verdi is burning with passion and sympathy for these people with their overwhelming sense of love which can never be consummated and that is repressed but never destroyed even after it is crushed by church, fate and state.

Only Rodrigo finds true happiness and that is achieved by dreaming of sacrificing his life for his friend and the people of Flanders who are suffering genocide at the hands of Philip’s generals.

We are held in the grasp of Verdi’s unrelenting inspiration with music which boils beneath the majesty and solemnity of Philip’s autocratic court.

I showed you Elizabeth’s aria from the last act of the opera at the top of this blog where she acknowledges her love for Carlos and also realizes that there is nothing more for her in life apart from a frail agnostic thought that “if they still weep in heaven, weep over my sorrow”.

Her grief is the mirror of her husband’s, the unloved monarch himself who sings his solo at the beginning of the fourth act just before his almost literally terrifying encounter with the Grand Inquisitor and what is possibly the greatest act in any of the Verdi operas.

If you have the time, play this clip from the modern Paris opera production (1996) which restored as good a version of the French opera as we are likely to get. Here Phillip (José Van Dam)is asking for the Church’s approval of him handing over his son to the Inquisition and the Inquisitor (Eric Halfvarson) in return demands the life of Philip’s only confidant, the young idealist, Rodrigo:

No matter how many productions of Don Carlos I see, there will always be one performance which will tower above all others and that has to be the King Philip of Boris Christoff. I was fortunate enough to see him in the later days of his career, he died in 1996, and some of the very last airings at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, of Visconti’s pioneering production which, some years earlier had almost single-handedly fueled the opera’s popularity when previously it had been ignored as a difficult to produce, over-blown oddity.

If the opera is about love, regret and repression, no one better captures the darkness and bitterness of unrequited passion than Christoff whose voice, one of the greatest of the 20th. Century, is indelibly imprinted in my memory. His delivery of “Ella giammai m’amò!” (“She never loved me!”) still sends a chill down my spine. Here the king, having been up all night in his study grieving for his lot, finally opens his heart. Christoff dominated the stage with just the slightest of body movements, his powerful charisma, ability to project inner feelings and his peerless, if not gigantic, bass voice with its controlled pianissimo high notes, athletic breath control and its uniquely melancholy timbre. I have never been more impressed by any other performance on the opera stage.

If this is my favourite opera then maybe it is because that clash between idealistic passion and dark pessimism chimes with something deep inside my own subconscious – something, you will be pleased to know, I mostly keep to myself. When I am feeling more cheerful I turn to one of my other favourite operas, Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, for its more balanced view of humanity’s darkness and light.

This video, I think, with, sadly, the first part of the aria omitted, was taken in 1979…I would love to have seen the rest of the act with the scene with the Grand Inquisitor. Underneath I have printed the words in Italian and English so that you can hear just how important the linking of music and words is in opera and in Christoff’s art.

Dormirò sol nel manto mio regal,
I shall sleep alone in my royal mantle

quando la mai giornata è giunta a sera,
when I attain the evening of my days,

dormirò sol sotto la vôlta nera,
I shall sleep under the black vault,

là nell’avello dell’Escurial.
there, in my tomb in the Escurial.

Se il serto regal a me desse il poter
If the royal crown could but give me

di leggere nel cor
the power to read human hearts

che Dio può sol, può sol veder,
which God alone can see!

Ah! se il serto regal a me desse il poter
Ah, if the royal crown could but give me

di leggere nel cor
the power to read human hearts

che Dio può sol, può sol veder,
which God alone can see!

Se dorme il prence, veglia il traditore;
If the prince sleeps, the traitor watches;

il serto perde il re, il consorte l’onore!
the king loses his crown, the husband his honour!

Dormirò sol nel manto mio regal etc.
I shall sleep alone in my royal mantle etc.

Ella giammai m’amò!
She never loved me!

No, quel cor chiuso è a me,
No, her heart is closed to me,

amor per me non ha?
she feels no love for me!

The post Don Carlos – is it my favourite opera? appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I have been listening to music recently which was all written in the late 1850s and that moment has occured more than once.

This probably sounds dangerously obsessive I know but I have been gradually working my way through the whole history of Western Classical music…starting some time ago now in the Eleventh Century.

I feel so much better now that I have told you both my guilty secrets.

Actually it has been an inspiring self-inflicted project where I have tried to keep my ears focused historically on each period as I work my way through.

Listening and concentrating got a bit tough after my brain haemorrhage but I am well established back in my musical saddle as 1858 draws to an end with some revelations and more than a few old favourites long postponed.

There have been some punishments too. Moments when I sat listening to works which required the administration of masochistic flesh pinches to keep myself awake.

How many symphonies by Niels Gade can any sane man listen to? I reckon three but I have now got to number six.

And then there’s Franz Liszt. He was obviously great in his early flashy and revolutionary days when he turned the piano into a new sound world and, so they say, great in bed too, but once you start getting to mid century, hmmm, I for one miss the vulgarity and brilliant extravagance.

Early Brahms too! Well, he had to learn I know but it is not a journey I want to follow step by step. I think he knew that too sitting by that wood burner shredding his notes when he knew that he was dying. Would you forgive me if I said I wouldn’t mind if he had dropped his German Requiem into the fire but you listen to it if you must. I love the symphonies and concertos so don’t get me wrong about Brahms but I start with him once he has got well into his stride.

By the time you get into the 1850s most of the Romantic heroes have died young or have been mostly silenced either permanently or intermittently by mostly non-musical events. I am thinking of two still under-rated geniuses and personal favourites:

Berlioz

And Rossini.

Did I mention Wagner?

Of his operas, by now, we have had Rienzi (what a bore apart from the overture), The Flying Dutchman (sensational), Lohengrin (sensational in parts and two great overtures) and Tannhauser ( sensational in fewer parts but with one of the best overtures) and more recently Rheingold (now we’re talking).

At this stage in his career, I think my opinion of Wagner is quite closely aligned to the judgement of my musical hero, Rossini: “Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.”

Rossini had it right, I think, when he added: “Every kind of music is good, except the boring kind.”

I found a new quote from the great Italian the other day regarding Lohengrin too:

“One can’t judge Wagner’s opera Lohengrin after a first hearing, and I certainly don’t intend to hear it a second time.”

Sorry Wagner but I know what he means even if I love all that lyrical but slightly dotty stuff with the swan.

I know that we have most of the great music to come and I am not knocking Tristan or the Ring but then don’t forget we have yet to get to all those terrible books and the crazy anti-Semitic rubbish too.

Maybe we would love Wagner more if we tried to think of him less as a Teutonic giant and more as he really was: a man embarrassed by being very short, happier to hang loose in chiffon frocks and desperate to find ways of hiding from his wife,Liszt’s daughter, the appalling Cosima who seems to have dreamt of Adolf long before he was a twinkle in Mr and Mrs. Hitler’s eyes.

So I have been dragging my feet a little, I have to confess.

I thought that I might put the 1850s on to fast forward until I remembered Verdi, Offenbach and Saint-Saens!

Call me superficial if you want but give me these three gentlemen any day.

It might have been a slog, I admit, to spend time with the three Verdi operas of this period – The Sicilian Vespers, Simon Boccanegra and Aroldo. They were written between the sensational middle period works, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata and the early later ones, Un Ballo In Maschera (A Masked Ball), La Forza del Destino (The Force Of Destiny) and Don Carlos. Whatever their faults, and there are many, there is one thing about Verdi which Rossini would agree, he is never boring.

Try them for yourself. The Vespers is his first go at French Grand Opera and, if nothing else, it will show you how he prepared himself for that supreme Grand Opera where he told the French how to do it, Don Carlos.

Aroldo, which is a reworking of the earlier opera Stiffelio, the opera about a vicar and his adulterous wife. It might be a silly censor-dodging re-write of the original plot but it is where Verdi started to write for the dramatic soprano voice a type of singing that he virtually invented with its need for power throughout the range and a strong bottom register. The blueprint for those great and vocally demanding heroine roles, Amelia in A Masked Ball, Leonora in Force of Destiny, Elizabetta in Don Carlos and Aida herself.

Simon Boccanegra is, well, bloody marvellous! A lot of it was re-written over twenty years later than our period of 1858 when Verdi was back working at white hot inspiration. It is a unique example in his whole output. A mix of middle period Verdi’s more traditional but exciting musical language with late Verdi’s supreme mastery of the orchestra and his now refined sense of theatrical concision.

It is a dark piece, mostly for low voices, baritones and basses, with thrilling writing for brass and a gloomy but dramatic plot coloured by Verdi’s twin obsessions – parental relationships and the limits of political power.

If you like Verdi but don’t know Simone Boccanegra then it is time you put that to rights.

And before I go, let me just say two names: Offenbach and Saint-Saens.

1858 saw the premiere of Offenbach’s Orpheus In The Underworld which is to opera what The Importance of Being Earnest is to the straight theatre. It laughs at conventions, ridicules cliches, and boots mediocrity into the long grass of oblivion and is, best of all, and unlike the work of almost any other classical composer, Rossini apart, very very funny. Oh and it’s where the can-can comes from too.

This year also saw the composition of two concertos by a 23 year old genius who might have been the greatest composer of his day. His trouble, maybe was that, in Berlioz’s words, “He knows everything but lacks inexperience.”

Camille Saint-Saens, who will, of course always be remembered for The Carnival of the Animals, was in that select band of natural musical geniuses who understood music before they were potty-trained. Saint-Saens, Mendelssohn and Mozart if the talent they showed in their mother and toddler groups didn’t peak, should have been the three names at the top of the musical edifice.

Only Mozart, of course, made the ultimate grade. He sits there with those relatively late developers on the list of supreme musical talent:Bach, Handel, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert.

Mendelssohn and Saint-Saens though should never be under-estimated even if they were both maybe too successful for their own good and too comfortable in a musical language which stopped them from scaling the heights.

I came across these two Saint-Saens concertos for the first time last week. The First Piano Concerto and the Second Violin Concerto. OK, they are not the greatest ever written but they are substantial works. Unpretentious, though unconventional and with a distinct musical personality, they inject life and wit into the concerto form just when it looked like it was going to disappear exclusively and permanently up the long dark orifice of mid-century German music.

I plan to listen to a lot more music by Saint-Saens who, amazingly lived to hear Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and who shared the young Russian upstart’s dislike for music that made too many claims for itself.

Go on then, see what you think. It is possible to write serious music with humour and irony.

Let’s leave the last word to Verdi’s darkly serious Simone Boccanegra though in a performance from La Scala Milan which was to be recorded and which is still the definitive cd set of this wonderful opera. Perfect casting in a scene where the Doge of Genoa tries to tell warring Italian states to unite and live together in peace. Verdi’s great manifesto for peace and unity which is still a lesson for us all.

I can’t wait for 1859.

The post Whilst Some Composers Get Bogged Down Verdi And Offenbach Hit The Button Every Time appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.